Lifelong learning is crucial to a country¿s continued competitiveness, prosperity and social cohesion and yet no country has had a means of gauging the extent of lifelong learning within its population. The Composite Leaning Index (CLI) developed by the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL) shows how this gap might be filled by assessing the state of lifelong learning over time, for individual communities and across Canada using the conceptual four-pillar framework of lifelong learning proposed by UNESCO's International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century.
This report aims at validating and critically assessing the methodological approach undertaken by the CCL to build the CLI. Our focus is on the robustness assessment of the index, with a view to identify whether certain methodological choices distort the messages provided by the CLI. Data-driven narratives on lifelong learning issues in Canada are also discussed in this report with a view to show directions of discussions and messages that stem from an index-based analysis of lifelong learning and are related to identifying weaknesses, proposing remedial actions, allowing for easy spatial and temporal comparisons (benchmarking), prioritizing areas in Canada of relatively low lifelong content, monitoring and evaluating policies effectiveness and ultimately funneling resources to provinces through, for example, multilateral and bilateral agreements between Canadian cities. The conceptual and methodological framework of the CLI bear the appealing and necessary features to render the Canadian Composite Learning Index a forerunner to a European counterpart.